St. Louis Named Number One Most Deadly Place to Live in America

Making the rounds this week is yet another negative ranking that has St. Louis occupying the No. 1 spot. The Conservative Post has named St. Louis the "most deadly" place to live in America in its latest top ten list, beating out Memphis, Houston, Seattle, New Orleans, New York, Newark, Miami, Oakland and Los Angeles.

As we've chronicled many times -- most notably with a Washington University crime rap -- officials in St. Louis argue that crime rankings comparing American cities are inherently flawed and unfairly place us at the top. That's because, St. Louis city is counted separately from the county but is generally compared alongside larger metro areas that include larger surrounding suburban areas.

In fact, most recently, there have been renewed calls from city and county police officials to encourage the feds to merge the stats, so St. Louis is compared fairly -- and ideally removed from the top spots on these ranking.

Here's a recent tweet/map from the blog nextSTL.com that offers a bit of a visual representation of this stat problem:

So with that huuuge caveat aside, the Conservative Post says, "St. Louis has the highest rate of violent crime of any large US city. We're talking murder, rape, and assault." For what it's worth, last month, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief Sam Dotson reported that crime in the city is down this year.

"Popular Science," the article says, "adds that St. Louis has a higher-than-normal chance of natural disasters."

Here are the the top five other non-crime reasons that St. Louis is the deadliest: